A Note on Golden Showers, Even if You Never Take Them

After the year we just had, you probably thought nothing could surprise you going into 2017. But we're barely two weeks into the New Year, and there's already a fun new issue with which to grapple: The fact that news anchors and reporters are repeatedly using the phrase "golden showers" when talking about President-elect Donald Trump.

The term started trending on social media Tuesday night, after Buzzfeed leaked an unverified intelligence dossier that suggested Trump may have done a number of salacious things, including engaging in the act of golden showers with sex workers in a Russian hotel room. There was more to the report—like that Trump may have been compromised by Russian intelligence, that FBI Director James Comey may have known about the allegations when he flagged Hillary Clinton’s emails ahead of the election but chose to protect the GOP, that Russia may have been blackmailing Trump, plus plenty more. All disturbing (and unconfirmed), but it's hard to shake the fact that we're discussing golden showers with the soon-to-be leader of the free world.

So what exactly are they? Where have you heard the term before? How should you feel about rumors that the President-elect is into them? Let’s discuss.

1. What is a golden shower?

For those of you who have (allegedly) "never heard of it,” here’s a working definition:

Golden shower, n., a sexual act involving one party urinating on another for purposes of erotic gratification and/or humiliation.

Synonyms include urolagnia, urophilia, piss-play, water sports, the yellow slip and slide, and gilding the lily. When Russia is involved, it’s typically called “going behind the Golden Curtain.”

Just kidding about some of those.

2. Should I have an opinion on golden showers?

Only if that’s what’s in your heart!

If it matters, though, Twitter certainly had a lot of opinions—enough that “golden showers” started trending globally:

Maybe it'll help to think of it this way: While it's probably not great for Trump to be affiliated with a fetish right now, bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, saying you’ll build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, suggesting gun violence toward your political opponent, and mocking disabled reporters are all almost certainly worse offenses.

Most famously, a season three episode of Sex and the City entitled “Politically Erect” in which Carrie is dating a politician (!!!) played by a pre-Mad Men John Slattery who eventually requests that she pee on him. After some thought, she very politely declines. Then she gets dumped.

In a first-season episode of Girls, there's a scene in which Adam pees on Hannah, but that one is less sexual and more nonconsensual, unfunny humiliation that will remind you of all the times on that show when Adam was a real effin’ d-bag. But it still counts.

Then there’s this scene from the 2012 indie film The Paperboy that many reference as a golden-shower scene. It shows Nicole Kidman peeing on Zac Efron, but that’s because of a jellyfish sting—not really sexual gratification. If you count that, you also have to count the scene from Friends when Chandler pees on Monica.

Neither of the above two are really piss-play canon but deserve an honorable mention.

5. Is squirting during orgasm considered a golden shower?

Glad you asked!

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Science has a lot to say on the subject of squirting. A study published in 2015 by The New Scientist, which I find myself quoting a lot on Tinder dates, suggests that squirting (or “female ejaculation”) comes in two forms: One is liquid secreted from the Skene's glands (akin to the male prostate gland) that typically contains a small amount of milky white fluid.

The other form matches what many of us porn viewers consider squirting—a large amount of clearish fluid that comes out during orgasm and soaks everything in its vicinity. When the climax involving this second form of female ejaculate was duplicated on subjects in a lab, the scientists determined that this liquid was mostly coming from the bladder. Which is where pee comes from. Which suggests that what many of us consider female ejaculate is actually pee. Are you still with me?

The U.K. government ignores any distinction as well. During 2014’s big porn ban, the British Board of Film Classification slapped videos containing female ejaculation with a big “ABSOLUTELY NOT, MY GOOD CHAP,” because they classified it as a form of urolagnia (see answer to number one on this list).

I feel like there is some distinction, though. After all, squirting is an end (usually a happy one!) that one gets to by some means of sexual stimulation. Golden showers are themselves a kind of sexual stimulation—a means through which ones arrives at an ending. Am I thinking too much about this?

What it really all trickles down to is that we’re talking about once-taboo sex acts in an open forum, and the media are barely batting an eye. We may not agree on how to treat fetishes, or how to feel about our President-elect engaging in them, but at least now the entire world will never have to Google "what is a golden shower?"